The secret chamber fell into silence.
A white bulb hung from the ceiling, bathing the room in bright light. Konome Taketori sat cross-legged on the floor with her eyes closed. Every faint flutter of her lashes leaked a sharp gray radiance.
Ever since taking control of Root, she had tossed Danzo's old habits straight into the trash.
Why did a secret organization have to keep its rooms pitch-black?
Relying on candlelight was just old Danzo failing to keep up with the times. Thanks to the cables pulled in when the Lightning Pool chamber was built, Konome Taketori had ordered Tsubaki-hime to install electric lights in every room of Root. Only the conference hall had been left in its original style.
Gray light flickered.
Drawn by the cultivation of the original body and the Yang Release split body, the tiny Konome Taketori clones responsible for studying the Flying Thunder God Technique kept glancing toward the original.
Their childish little faces still carried baby fat. They peeked over with wide eyes, looking like guilty little puppies.
The flesh clones produced by the Yang Release split body had multiplied again, but due to their limited chakra reserves, all it could create were miniature versions of Konome Taketori. They were only a third of the Yang Release body's height. With their delicate features and tiny stature, they looked like beautiful dolls.
The Yang Release split body held a notebook in one hand while crackling lightning flowed along the other arm. As it watched the original body attempt Sage Mode cultivation, even it felt a little tense.
If the balance between natural energy and chakra broke, the body would begin turning to stone.
It still did not know how precise the original's control over natural energy was. If something went wrong, it might have to kill its own master.
Sitting cross-legged, Konome Taketori abruptly sensed a trace of danger. The gray eye scanned the movements of every split body, and a faint smile touched her lips.
They had not inherited the gray eye, so naturally they could not understand just how terrifying her control over Takamagahara truly was. Natural energy was like another part of her own body. Even if her training failed, she could simply spit it back out. There was no real danger of becoming a stone statue.
Ignoring the little motions of the split bodies, Konome Taketori continued gathering the natural energy of heaven and earth.
The image of Takamagahara in her pupils shifted. Sky, earth, mountains, rivers... under the stimulation of her ocular power, endless natural energy shot toward Root.
The concentration of natural energy in Konoha's air was very low. She did not know how much would be needed to cultivate Sage Mode, so she simply pulled in as much as possible.
Woo...
A breeze gradually rose in the chamber. The crack of the door began to whistle.
Vast quantities of natural energy gathered inside. The concentration in the room rose dozens of times over. Even the split bodies, who could not directly sense natural energy, could tell the environment had become more comfortable. Even the air itself seemed fresher.
"It's coming."
The Yang Release split body quietly tensed, raising its hand like a blade as purple lightning bloomed around it. It struck a pose similar to a Lightning Release decapitation strike.
Konome Taketori paid no attention. Looking at the rainbow-colored motes drifting through the air, her eyes flashed, and threads of natural energy slipped through her tenketsu and into her meridians.
The moment it entered her body, there was no strange sensation at all.
It did not itch or sting.
If not for the gray eye showing her that strand of colored light flowing through her meridians, she would have thought she had merely inhaled a harmless breeze.
She waited a moment. After confirming that the natural energy would not turn her flesh to stone, she guided it toward her heart.
Silently, the colored current dragged a long tail through her meridians and slammed into the chakra seed in her heart.
On the violet sea of chakra, invisible spiritual energy and green bodily energy were just beginning to merge when a thread of rainbow natural energy suddenly mixed in, and the three energies tangled together into a single cluster.
"..."
Konome Taketori stared at the mixed energy with great anticipation.
She stared until her eyes were sore.
Still, the reaction she wanted never came.
The three energies looked fused, but on the microscopic level they remained distinct and separate. Even spiritual and bodily energy, already old partners who had been together for ages, now acted like complete strangers.
Damn it.
Of course it wouldn't be that easy.
She could not help but curse under her breath.
The method for creating senjutsu chakra definitely involved some unknown principle. It could not be as simple as mixing natural energy and chakra according to a set ratio.
Training in Mount Myoboku's Sage Mode produced toad traits and gave greater boosts to power. Ryuchi Cave's method gave snake eyes and greater speed. Those differences clearly came from different cultivation methods.
Just as spiritual and bodily energy had to go through a whole series of complex reactions before producing chakra, senjutsu chakra had to be even harder to refine.
Refusing to give up, Konome Taketori adjusted the proportions of natural energy, spiritual energy, and bodily energy again and again. With her astonishing control, she brought them to a perfect one-to-one-to-one ratio even on the microscopic level. The three energies floated together in a murky cluster above the violet sea.
And yet the senjutsu chakra she imagined never appeared.
"It didn't work?"
The Yang Release split body lowered its hand and cautiously asked after seeing the original's expression.
Konome Taketori opened her eyes and shook her head helplessly.
At once, every Konome Taketori in the room wore the same look of disappointment.
When they had been researching Hidan and the shinobi system, they had placed enormous hopes on Sage Mode.
Natural energy was the highest-grade super-energy in the Naruto world. It was also the root of all supernatural power.
The planet's original transcendent lifeforms, represented by Jashin, the Shinigami, and Mount Myoboku, had all obtained their extraordinary abilities by directly or indirectly manipulating natural energy in some way.
Because she had encountered so little of it, Konome Taketori still did not know how those beings used natural energy. She could only roughly classify it as the Natural System.
She had only encountered two users of that Natural System so far.
One was Hidan, with his immortal body.
The other was Enma, with his adamantine body.
Based on canon information, she guessed that the Natural System excelled more in flesh and soul, but was far harder to cultivate.
Concepts like "clear and empty heart" and "unity with heaven and earth" were only the first step of the Natural System, and their entry barrier was far beyond what ordinary people could imagine.
It was difficult, had a low floor, and an unknown ceiling. It could not really be called an excellent system.
The Otsutsuki called themselves gods and spread colonial destruction across the cosmos. What they relied on was the God Tree, which could devour all the natural energy of a planet and convert it into an ocean of chakra.
That allowed them to step away from the Natural System and create their own Chakra and Dojutsu System.
Planting trees to absorb natural energy, devouring chakra fruits to evolve, awakening dojutsu to gain new powers... it was all a foolproof one-button process.
It was like taking something as vague as immortal cultivation and turning it into a universally applicable biotechnology.
The threshold dropped drastically.
Infinite devouring. Infinite cycles of plunder. In the end, one would surpass all things and become an Otsutsuki god. Both the lower limit and the upper limit of that path were extremely high.
It was a visibly radiant road.
And the superiority of the chakra and dojutsu system had indeed crushed the natives of the Natural System completely.
But that did not mean the Otsutsuki system was unbeatable.
Sage Mode was precisely a new road that had emerged on top of the Otsutsuki chakra system.
Konome Taketori called it the Third System, the one that combined all the strengths of chakra and natural energy alike: the Sage and Senjutsu System.
She did not know who its creator had been. She guessed it was probably the Sage brothers together with the old toad of Mount Myoboku.
They mixed one-third natural energy into chakra and refined it through some unknown method into senjutsu chakra that surpassed everything else.
Senjutsu chakra was ten times more powerful than ordinary chakra.
Before learning Sage Mode, Naruto had probably been around elite jonin level. After mastering it, he jumped straight to high-kage tier, and with Kurama's help he could even smash Pain.
The Sage brothers sealing Kaguya Otsutsuki for a thousand years probably also relied on the power of Sage Mode and senjutsu. It did not elevate one's life form, but in terms of combat amplification, its effects were monstrous.
Noble senjutsu chakra could even resist the Rinnegan's ability to absorb chakra, so it was hardly surprising that Kaguya, the progenitor of chakra, had lost.
One could even say her defeat had been inevitable.
In the Warring States era, great clans like the Senju, Uchiha, Kaguya, and Uzumaki had clung to their old glory and refused to change. In the end, they had been crushed to pieces by the new shinobi village system.
The native creatures of the Natural System had been utterly defeated by the Otsutsuki, who developed a new system.
Kaguya's defeat looked incomprehensible on the surface, but in truth she had lost on the level of systems to the Sage brothers, who fused nature and chakra.
In other words:
Natural System < Chakra System < Sage System.
And after awakening Takamagahara, the mighty natural energy had finally unveiled its mysterious face before her.
Using chakra and ocular power to pry open the boundless natural energy in the environment and control the world from a macroscopic level, she had, while still relying on the chakra and dojutsu system, unexpectedly begun intruding into the Natural System as well.
If she could learn Sage Mode, then with the power of Takamagahara she could fuse the planet's original Natural System, the Otsutsuki Chakra and Dojutsu System, and the Sage and Senjutsu System of the Sage brothers into a single furnace.
At that point, whether facing Kaguya Otsutsuki or the Sage brothers, she would have the power to fight.
"We're not the creators of the system. There's no need to feel our way across the river. We can just copy the homework."
Seeing that the original was still trying to refine senjutsu chakra, the Yang Release split body could not help but advise her. It almost said "copy the Sage of Six Paths" out loud, but corrected itself in time.
Until they knew whether the Sage brothers were enemies or allies, and before stepping into the Six Paths realm, it did not want to draw too much of their attention.
After several more failures, Konome Taketori could only open her eyes in regret and disperse the natural energy she had gathered.
Hashirama had been able to enter perfect Sage Mode directly through his Sage Body. There was no reason she should be unable to.
But in the short term, there really was no easy way in.
After the Chunin Exams were over, she would probably have to visit all three great sage regions and learn enough to create a Sage Mode of her own.
If she stepped into Six Paths after spanning all three great systems, she should not be weaker than the Sage of Six Paths himself.
Just as Konome Taketori was planning the future of her own system, more minor village teams continued arriving in Konoha.
Thanks to the new broad road outside the village, those small-village shinobi naturally gathered into streams and lined up under the guidance of Konoha's patrol personnel.
"Hello, we're from Hoshigakure..."
Natsuhi, the jonin leading Hoshigakure's team, smiled lightly as she spoke with Yama-shiro Aoba. A faint green glow shone in her eyes.
"It's so big."
"And there are so many people."
Standing behind Natsuhi, two female genin with star-shaped forehead protectors looked at the endless broad road and gasped in awe.
"Northern Star, Mitsuren, take the chance to observe. These are all opponents we may face in the exam."
A handsome boy with black hair and brown eyes spoke with a serious expression as he scanned the surrounding shinobi.
"R-right... right."
The tea-haired girl called Northern Star answered softly, but her gaze kept drifting toward the handsome boy. Her lovely face could not help flushing red.
Ang was so handsome.
She screamed internally.
By contrast, the blue-violet-haired Mitsuren was not so love-struck. She straightened up and observed the surrounding ninja together with Ang, searching for enemies worth noting.
"Cough cough..."
"Excuse us. Mind letting us pass?"
A weak voice suddenly came from behind them. Mitsuren, who had been seriously assessing the opposition, jumped and spun around.
A pale-haired, green-eyed, cold-faced boy with two red marks on his forehead was coughing without pause. Beside him, a burly man with orange hair was supporting his arm. When Mitsuren turned, the man immediately gave her a friendly smile.
Behind them stood a group of strangely shaped, decidedly unfriendly-looking ninja, all staring coldly at her.
The killing intent mixed with malice sent a chill down Northern Star's spine. Her body went stiff, trembling so hard she could not force out a single word.
At once, both Ang and Northern Star noticed the Sound ninja behind them. Their hearts tightened, but when they saw Mitsuren standing there shaking, anger surged up.
Ang stepped in front of Mitsuren.
"We were here first. If you want to enter the village, go line up at the back."
"You bastard..."
The hot-tempered Sakon started to step forward, only to be stopped by a hand.
"Cough cough..."
Kimimaro raised his arm to halt Sakon. Looking at the determined Ang and the surrounding gazes gathering toward them, he coldly said, "Don't cause trouble."
"Yes."
Faced with Kimimaro's command, Sakon did not dare say more. He clicked his green lips in disdain at Ang, drew a finger across his throat in mockery, and returned to the group with Ukon on his back.
The star ninja trio glared in anger at the Sound team, but at that moment Natsuhi, who had been speaking with Aoba, noticed the disturbance and quickly called them over.
"Ang, Northern Star, Mitsuren, come over for the inspection."
Though unwilling, Ang and the others could only turn and head toward Konoha's checkpoint after Natsuhi called a second time.
The surrounding shinobi, seeing no show was going to happen, cursed the cowards under their breath and lost interest.
"Cough cough..."
"Are you still okay?"
Jugo supported Kimimaro's shoulder, worry written all over his face.
Kimimaro's terminal illness had left him on the edge of death, yet Orochimaru had insisted that Konoha held a chance to treat his bloodline sickness and ordered them to bring him for the Konoha Crush plan.
But in Kimimaro's current condition, how could he possibly carry out any mission?
"I'm fine."
Kimimaro wiped the blood from the corner of his mouth with his sleeve and stared toward Konoha's gate, determination in his eyes.
After his illness took hold, he had done nothing but lie in bed lingering on the edge of death.
Rather than wait uselessly for death to claim him, he would rather enter Konoha and gamble on a single chance.
And even if he failed to find a cure for his bloodline disease, if he could help Orochimaru-sama before he died, then his death would not be in vain.
"Next!"
Hearing the shout from the front of the line, Kimimaro forced himself upright. Under Jugo's hesitant gaze, he slowly walked toward Konoha's checkpoint.
"Otogakure, team of nine."
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